Temporal Bone
by Dr. Agent
Summary: He had never taken that step backwards, slipped out of time.


Years. Not weeks or months, but time enough for the Earth to make circles around the sun.

He thought he had loved her for years. He couldn't help but tack on a chronological sense. A chart marked with jumps and spikes, progressing (rapidly, he found) towards the perpetual here-and-now. Outstretched and with abandon, the grips of his soul opened to envelop her.

Born in nine minutes, grown in office hours, harbored in shared years.

Nestled next to his files and preoccupations, Scully loomed.

* * *

There are remnants of tape adhesive on his window and a glow from the TV. He'd rather be in the office.

Half the night was spent combing through red and white folders, his fingers unable to feel anything but dry letter paper and sunflower husks. Like any great love, it seemed to take a part of him. He laid down on the couch, replaying the day, documenting. This is how he slipped into sleep.

Something oily was on his hands, so when he frantically combed them over the aged walls he smeared messy trails. Death a passage never described in an autobiography, it is the living left with the weight of the dead. In the ground, scattered in the oceans, floating though the air, freckling stories of life and leaving gaps or holes in the pictures of family, friends. He wondered where she would tell him to release her ashes as he stumbled around, curious to why he felt so detached as to mentally ramble on about the mundane aftermath of death.

"Scully," he called out, forcing his eyes to stay open against the dark. When his fingers finally found her, they were sticky with liquid and dust. In the pitch black of a midnight motel, he heard her voice.

"You found me," she said with gravity. He felt a tug on his shirt collar. The lights flashed on and he saw her, laughing, as if life could never pass her by. He felt himself laughing too, hovering. He took the plunge.

The inertia of being hurdled to consciousness allowed his upper body to continue upward. He applied pressure to his chest, as if to hold something inside. In the hazy moments semi-awake, he desperately recalled the images of the dream, tying them together in a knotted string. It's mornings like these that he wonders if she truly exists.

She had been floating in the hell of space, no doubt, as he made waste of his life on Earth. He might have killed himself if she had not come back, the last words he spoke being _I'm sorry_. To which of the two females it would be directed towards...he had not decided.

In all the complexity of the universe, the trillions of atoms composing it, the fact that some had gathered to form a little redhead wearing a pantsuit in his office was one of the greater joys discovered. He had to swallow his guilt, his distress, in the life before Scully. But with an opening of a door, in walked absolution. She listens. She is hope that the sidewalk doesn't end, and he won't fall, tumbling into unknown realms.

He found his resurrection from the handpicked spy.

* * *

Her hair was flipping at the ends from the humidity, brought by a cold fall rain. The ones that make the red leaves heavy, the grass look a vibrant green, and the roads darker and dangerous. He was remembering the time up in Chilmark when, after a similar rain, he had grabbed a leaf from an autumn tree. He squinted and focused all his power into it, but it never looked anything but dead. It pervaded him, the unknown colors. That was the year he found out Christmas was beautiful to everyone else, and it's why he still holds a resentment of a vague direction.

A sprinkle of water on his face brought him back to the present. Scully had picked a leaf off a limb barely in her reach, and the snap-to of the wood had flicked droplets onto both of them. "What did that leaf ever do to you," was on the verge of emergence, but Scully spoke first.

"It reminds me of a crisp, red apple."

"What?" He was mildly perplexed at her random omission. "The leaf?"

"The city, after a cold rain." She thumbed the bit of foliage, and looked at him. "But you can't see it, can you?" He had no recollection of mentioning his colorblindness to her. In fact, he very rarely mentioned it at all, to anyone. A suspicion the FBI might have something to say took care of that.

But instead of asking how she knew, or anything remotely resembling an appropriate response, he said "What?"

"Deuteranopia," she says simply. He nods, and asks, "How did you know?" She turns to him and holds out the leaf to place in his hand. As he accepts it she says that it was little things, the sum of ties, red ink, subliminal messages.

"I must look like an antique," she states, a mixture of subtle emotions borne in her furrowed brow.

The words strike him in a funny way. "No," he says, reaching with a fingertip to brush a frizzy-curled end of hair from her temple.

She breaks the line of sight, and looks out over the sward. He wonders how often she has concerned herself with that musing. But as he looks from the corner of his eye, a smile tugs her mouth. He chuckles in spite of himself, made giddy by the piercing air and mist, the thought that she enjoys his company. Glad they are both alive and together. He slips the leaf into his pocket. Later, hours removed from her and the office, he found himself staring at it, as if attention and charm was all he needed to see its true colors.

She said that pathologists were paranoid by nature, and he never forgot it.

He saw her in every crowded room.

* * *

Right now he hates the yellow wall of this motel room, with every fiber of his being.

He hangs his head with the thought that she would have locked the door. But as he gets up the bed creeks, and as he takes a step he hears the dead-bolt slide into place, barring him. He puts his palm to the obstacle. Closely, he listens for her to say something, but he hears nothing but the hum of the air conditioner. Then, like distant conversation, he caught her voice. She way praying. He immediately stops, walks away rubbing his face. She's walling him off.

He can only hope that God can hear, can give her all the things he can't.

The room is still. He wears his badge of paranoia, gavottes with his gun at the hip, but stripped of his dressings he is a loner, a traveling nine-to-fiver who clings to faraway things that stifle a hunger for normalcy. Thanksgiving dinners, a dog to walk, a wife to wash his socks. So in this palace of the supernatural, of shadow governments, blame can be placed on the shoulders of those mad men, but all the conspiracies in the world will never bring the lost ones back. He will never grow up with a kid sister who could run faster than the wind and throw one hell of a curve ball, loved bologna and loved her big brother.

He owns the vice, but Scully pays the bill. His is a currency consisting of reputations, sisters, and babies that can never be born. A girl named Emily and a mother named Dana.

He slides down the wall next to the lamp, the glow blotched and fuzzy through the wetness in his eyelashes. He's so tired, he closes his eyes.

There's a knock on the door.

"Mulder?" She sounds vulnerable as he lurches toward the sound.

"I'm here," he breathes, quickly wiping his eyes and smoothing the wrinkles from his shirt. She opens the door, slowly, and slides halfway through. When she shuts the door behind her, he can barely hear over his heartbeats.

She sucks in air, holding it in, and lets it out as she whispers, "Can I come in?"

"You've already shut the door," he laughs awkwardly, and a corner of her mouth twitches upward.

"It's too quiet over there, Mulder. I could really use your company." He barely holds in the urge to kiss her, but he's leaning into her slightly, unconsciously.

"Always," he informs her. He walks to the bed and sits down, and wordlessly she sit down next to him.

For every time he paddles their little ship into the hurricane, in every tear that has rolled down her check because of him or the things that she has weathered, there is a debt gathering, being owed, waiting to be paid. He whispers "all the things I've put you through," but she cuts him of with a hand on his thigh.

His eyes flick open. Scully never knocked on the door. Hell, she never unlocked it.

The clock reads three in the morning, and he slides off his shoes, dresses down. Crawls into sheets that smell like stale crackers, sound like rustling paper. Saves his misgivings for another day, because it's too late to wake her.

He found her in all the places he'd rather be.

* * *

Embarrassed by what he was doing, he lied. There was no suspect in the crowd watching _A Decade of Dirty Delinquents._

In hindsight, it was a shitty thing to do. But what's worse, he admits, is the way he treated her vis-a-vis. How he rubs it in her face that she tried to do something on her own, but had to call him. At every religious mention, he pushed her head back into the scientific ground. Don't be ridiculous, don't get duped by trivial words of God. But he was wrong. She opened her heart, and mind, to the unscientific explanation, and all he could do was turn a blind eye. If it was an alien, things would have to be different.

There was no creature from the black lagoon, just the mere Hand of God. It scared him.

Little lies. All the times she never saw it, all the times he just walked off, all the times she lost in his victory, all the times they hung their heads in silence. Giant sea creatures, regenerating men. God's messengers in parking lots. She was coming around, like a tethered ball, swinging towards him. Sometimes he was busy being blinded by the sky instead of looking at her approaching. He's too used to the rope unraveling, watching the ball roll into the part of the playground where Science plays. He can only take steps towards that place, eying it suspiciously.

Walking out to the car he sees she's fiddling with the Apollo key chain on her key ring. It must have broken off when she dropped her keys. He's struck by how he can be such an ass to her, but she'll bring him the good coffee in the morning. That's the rut they have fallen into. Her only joy in life is to prove him wrong, he's self-righteous and narcissistic. But maybe she wanted to be there. Maybe he's just lonely.

Neither one of them are good at emotions, expressing them or otherwise. He is like a dog, angry and biting when things don't go his way. He gets close to believing he is trying to push her too far, to drive her to yell and hit him and bang her fists on his chest. Then he can tell her it's okay. She's a tad too strong for that, but he's too stubborn to stop.

That spot on her spine is all his, the curve at which a hand resting is possessive, protective, assuring, alluring. A long time has been spent toying with the curiosity of its phantom pressure. She is a marked woman, and he wonders if she knows. Regardless of how he challenges her beliefs, or likewise her scientific explanations, his hand will always find the small of her back.

He wanted to be the biggest part of her.

* * *

His first thought was, "Oh my God, that shirt." He stared at her when she wasn't looking. Heat waves pulsing through him, a radiation dark and devious. Baby blue, low cut, tight.

If this is what almost dying gets him, he will die every day until she's naked. Oh, now he's picturing her naked.

Bad thought, he tells himself. Very bad.

Even standing under (what he was almost sure was) brain matter, he kept getting slapped in the face with infatuation. How he can go from screaming her name in fear to ogling her boobs is off-putting. Doesn't stop him, however, when the tight shirts continue. She has always been beautiful, but in a quiet way, a cerebral way. She's putting it out there now, and the idea that she's doing it for him, for any reason, is enough to distract him from his job. She has always found ways to shift his focus but now...

Scully stands poised, one long heal in the heart of his files. They have become the secondary characters, still there, still important, but no longer his top priority.

So he kisses her.

The wounds on her neck, his arm in a sling, Dick Clark rambling on, he kisses her. It was the natural thing to do. He didn't think the world was going to end, and neither did she, but it could have. It wouldn't matter. Because she didn't shy away, there was no fear in her eyes like before, she didn't punch him, and the world could have fizzed out of existence with his last feeling, last thought, last taste being compassion and Scully.

And even though they didn't spend Christmas together, or even exchange gifts, Scully is the closest thing to a wife he will ever get. He did buy her one though. Salt and pepper shakers in the form of carved pumpkins. For Halloween. He had just thought that she deserved one Christmas without him dragging her away. She needed it.

He remembers the time, on D.C. steps: she grabbed a sunflower seed from his hand and cracked it with her teeth. Quite possibly the sexiest thing he has ever seen. But he's been a witness to her dying, at her worst. Has found her battered and broken. He has viewed her, through guilty eyes, sitting across his desk on the verge of walking away, telling him that it's her life.

"But it's ours," he wanted to return, "Isn't it?" To find a partition between them was a punch to the gut, but not an unwarranted one. She was in the hospital soon after. So pale and worn, like an old porcelain doll. _Oh Scully_, he had cried. _I'll do anything_. He had nursed that promise since Oregon, from here to Antarctica, and any place in between. In the artificial stillness of her hospital room, he fights the urge to scoop her up and carry her away, but he laments that he doesn't know to where.

They have evolved, into what he is unsure. They have soundly stepped over the line of platonic, but that was some time ago. He knows that when he looks at her, he's glancing upon his significant other. Though involved, it's more than friendship, it's more than respect. Whereas his life is a progression filled with offshoots, their progression is linear. He is weighted by the past, but he must acknowledge.

He was happier now than he had ever been.

* * *

The atmosphere rolled slowly past their stationary point inside the bar.

It's easy to remember a time when there were no great leaps, only steps up a stairway. Those bounds had started with Scully. At times it feels as if he's breaking the sound barrier, or running faster than light, hurdling toward closure and resolution, and time is standing still. Meeting a dead sister in a foggy field, looking just as the day she left. Dashing to catch up with monsters and aliens, he was fueled by near misses and almost-had-its, carried in the arms of flukemen, in the vehicles of half-truths, on the backs of broken Jersey Devils. But now, mostly in the tiny frame of one Dana Scully.

"If You Could Read My Mind" played quietly through the speakers. He could hear her humming along. He asked, "Would you use your powers for good?"

Her eyes didn't leave the menu, but her eyebrows raised with a "hm?"

He lowered his head to get a better angle on her face. "If you could read minds, would you use your powers for good?"

She set the menu down, and looked at him in mock contemplation.

"I think I'll have the chicken."

"Scully," he groaned, rolling his eyes dramatically.

She sighed. "How could I use a power so deeply invasive for good?"

He shrugged.

"Preposterous," she finished. A coy look flirted with her face, and her scent lazily floated into him as she reached for one of the peanuts.

Thudding in his chest, the dull ache of untouchables radiated out like waves of a pulsar. Scully could appreciate that, the feeling and the pulsar reference. There's a flash in his brain and he steps into memories of Einstein and lens glare, trying to equate the woman before him and the woman he had imagined her to be. He was enthralled with how unaligned the pictures were. It was that spark of intrigue that pushed him into the tumbling roll of falling in love. It was that same spark that began restless nights of not just conspiracies or the supernatural, but of worries that they would run out of time together. It all added up to him not sleeping and cracking a lot more jokes, with every excuse to touch her taken.

She's really superhuman now, and she knows it. That gunshot to her abdomen was a linchpin connecting her past and her future, a bloody segue into everlasting life. He was looking at a saint, in this hole-in-the-wall. A woman who could save so many people, but chooses to save him. He doesn't like to think what immortality will do to her, what it really means.

Sometimes he sees her in a ruby red dress, hair in tight coils, fist flying. He loved her then.

He would catch himself thinking of her as a cataloged x-file. She might find it unsettling, but he found it erotic. Her file is always metaphorically sprawled on the table, with worn edges and droplets of pizza sauce, well loved and well read.

If only he could broach the tangible culmination, without metaphors and subtly. He fears it's only a matter of time until he breaks.

_I want to make love to you, Scully._

The waiter came by and he ordered for her. As the man left, she nudged his foot under the table.

"Mulder, did you know this place was built on a Native American burial ground?"

He thought his heart exploded.

* * *

He doesn't want to pack the bags, so she does it for him.

He stands at the steps to her building in the pouring rain, so close to the door. Cinematic and pointless. The bags are already in the car. He slowly turns his head, toward her window, eyes closed. When he opens them she is standing there beyond the glass, forcing that sharp, brave face.

"Am I watching a ghost," she had asked him. This was not long after recovering from what could only be alien zombification. He had been cold and detached from her, but what could he be but dead.

"Give me time," he said, poking the cushion, "sometimes I still feel..." he let the sentence fade.

"Dead," she concluded. She came to sit next to him on her couch, laboriously. "You're not, you know."

He smiled, leaning his head on her shoulder. "I know," he responded. _God, does he know_. When he woke up to her face, his feet finally touched the ground. The horror, the memories, came soon after. It made it hard to believe he was alive. He can still feel the pain, the frigid atmosphere, his throat and lungs burning from crying out her name in vain. She had been so near.

He felt the need to say something. "We never got the chance to be a real couple, did we?"

The air from her sigh pushed tiny dust particles into the beams of sunshine. "No, we didn't."

His lips pressed into her neck. Lips are sensitive. Lips can tell.

"I make your heart beat fast, Scully."

Eyes closed, she whispered huskily, almost imperceptibly. "You do more than that." He was breathing her in as he grabbed her right hand and held the palm hard to his chest. _Thumpthumphumpthump_ in rapid succession. She sucked in a short gasp as he kissed the curve of her jawbone. His other fingers rested on her cheek like vines on a castle.

"For years," he spoke from his throat. His mouth floated dangerously close to her ear.

"...I have loved you."

When she crashed her mouth onto his, he was raw and open, ten times alive. Her hand almost clawed at him, heaved things like "miss", "always", and "never", deadly close to "love." But she's too good for that. Something wet caught on his thumb, and he slowly pulled back. Periwinkle refracted through the collection of tears, her eyes were weak and sad. Her hands clinched around his heart, even though she didn't mean to do it.

Her head tilted towards their clasped fingers that rested on his thigh. "You won't say it," her voice is strained and in a higher octave, "so I will." He shook his head against it, but she persisted.

"But don't you dare say goodbye."

He got one night with William. They were all quiet and still. He and Scully could only lock gazes, then on their son, then each other. Anything more, they found, just hurt too much.

He left her a shirt. The one he wore to bed. He folded it neatly, placed it on her bedside table while she stood in the living room. He doesn't know if it's like leaving a gift or a grenade.

Back outside in the downpour, he catches her mask falter. She pivots slightly toward William, he can tell by the arrangement of her features. He takes the opportunity to pay the cabbie, tells him to put these bags on a plane to nowhere, and hands him a credit card. The guy nods, and drives away. He doesn't care if the man does it or not as he pulls the keys from his pocket. He risks turning back to the window. He catches her, in a flash of lightening, holding William, but after the snap of light there is nothing in her place. Feet are heavy across the wet road. It's a feat of strength to make it to the car. As the keys slide into the ignition, a leaf falls and sticks to the windshield. He revolts against a memory, and looks away. Something in the passenger seat catches his eye.

_Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation. Handwritten Rough Draft._

She left him a love letter.

In her senior thesis, Scully wrote that time was a man-made concept. Humans create the paradoxes. We force parameters on the mechanics of the universe, we only enclose its wonder in the confines of our needs. In the eyes of the cosmos, a man in a spaceship and a correspondent on earth are just particles in space. They intermingle with all matter, and thus, are always connected.

There was a sentence she underlined in blue, just for him. Long after putting pen to paper, she reminded him of what she wrote.

_Time means nothing._

He reads it over and over.

* * *

**AN**: Albert Einstein was quoted with the following: "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Also, I am aware that the FBI requires color tests in its application, but I have often heard of people getting through these with color-deficiencies. It would be a reason to dismiss him, if the FBI found out, eager for a reason. Artistic License.


End file.
